


A Study on Rockstars

by MiceOnVenus



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe - 1990s, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Rock Band, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Archie Andrews Being an Idiot, Denial of Feelings, F/F, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Flirting, Humor, Jughead Jones is Not Asexual, Jughead Jones-centric, M/M, Mutual Pining, Porn with Feelings, Sex Drugs and Rock and Roll, Sexual Tension, Slow Burn, oh yeah, we're going back
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-16
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:55:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25913965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MiceOnVenus/pseuds/MiceOnVenus
Summary: In the mid-1990s, Jughead and Archie have diverged from their small town of Riverdale onto opposite roads; managing their respective bands, one being extremely successful and the other a stagnant work in progress, and phasing through their day-to-days questioning their purposes in the music industry's wheel. When circumstances draw them together, they find that they each have more to offer than what previously met the eye, and allow their mutual fascination to spiral into a relationship that risks not only their reputation, but their sanity.
Relationships: Archie Andrews/Jughead Jones, Archie Andrews/Valerie Brown, Cheryl Blossom/Toni Topaz, Holden Honey/Jughead Jones
Comments: 4
Kudos: 14





	1. Prologue

It’s New Years Eve, 1983. I’m eight years old, standing in the middle of Times Square, and I grip excitedly onto my mother’s hand. We’re a family for the last time. Static electricity charges the air around us and every strand of hair on my body is alive. On stage, a million miles away, the speakers blast a warm song of accordions and washboards. In the center of it all is a man close in age to my father, strumming a banjo and humming a lackadaisical tune into his microphone. I know this song. It’s on the radio all the time.

Above me, my mother jostles Jellybean in one arm. I swing her hand back and forth, back and forth, nodding my head, nodding my head, tapping my feet, trying to keep up with the fast paced tempo. At this moment we’re all touching, except for dad, who’s off to the side somewhere acting subdued. It’s going to be a catalyst for the argument that ends our nuclear family as we know it, but tonight he sees me melting into the major lift and splits the sea of people in two to reach me.

He picks me up off the ground and raises me onto his shoulders. I’ll never hold my mother’s hand again. At this elevation I can see the stage and all who’ve harnessed it. The music is less polluted by the sounds of shrieking and hollering, and I’m enraptured. A harmonica fades in. It’s crisp and speaks directly to me.

“I knew him once,” Dad says, sounding like he’s reminding himself of this rather than informing me, not straining himself to speak over the deafening crowd. “High school buddy of mine.”

“Whoa!” I respond. Partly to dad, partly to the sight I witness where the leading man reaches the climax of the song and his heart begins to bleed out of his mouth. 

I can feel dad’s chest and shoulders vibrate beneath my bony legs. It’s a chuckle. Last time I’ll ever feel that. I watch the man on stage through a new lens now with this information. I imagine him young; smoother skin, thinner in the gut, a tighter voice. I make my way from the bottom up — but when I reach his eyes, there’s nothing to fix. Under the artificial lights they shine naturally. They observe the crowd. I hope they’ll see me. For some reason, I want him to notice me, I want him to understand that I understand him. At the very least, I understand the sound he’s offering.

Instead, he plucks another young boy out of the crowd. The kid is lifted onto a stage which encompasses a quarter of the Square, a kid that doesn’t even breach the man’s hip but looks upon the people with a gaze that ensnares them all. His orange hair is a struck match in the limelight. Their eyes shine the same. The kid doesn’t know what’s coming for him.

The ball drops. The crowd detonates, a cacophony of madness, my eardrums blown. The kid and I look at one another.

A million miles away. He still sees me.


	2. I. Carpe Noctem

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> what we've learned today is that i'm bad at updating fics! nonetheless here is the official first chapter (:

**I. Carpe Noctem**  
_"Seize the night."_

May 20th, 1995

It’s a Saturday night and I’m sober. 

We’re idling at the stage stairs and chain smoking while we wait out the band preceding us. I observe their audience, which will be ours in a little under five minutes, and I see that they’ve fallen headlong into the deafening drums and overzealous guitar. Shouldn’t be difficult to enchant them with our rhythm if they’re so transfixed in the performance they’re being callously offered. All we have to do is play loud, demand to be heard. 

The smoke circles sweetly in my lungs. I don’t predict anything miraculous will come out of tonight, which is why the cigarette tastes so good. My body’s trying to suck as much joy out of the evening as possible. We’re opening with _Mindkiller_ , an easy song to enjoy, which is maybe why I dislike it the most. It’s a love ballad masked in a frantic tempo, meant to resemble panic and a gradual descent into madness during the chorus. Layered, but definitely not the most convoluted of our singles.

I’d really like a drink to pair with this suspiciously delicious cigarette. The crowd’s atmosphere is pathetic, a gathering of wanderlusting souls praising a mediocre heavy metal band giving half an effort, their adoration palpable. Acknowledging the fact that their reaction to our set will either bring us to victory or enact our downfall leaves me anguished. No one else shares my sentiments, all my fellow band members tired of straining to earn the right to hypnotize a crowd. 

From beside me, Toni sucks languidly on her cigarette and blows the smoke between the curtains. Her eyes are trained on the lead singer. Nasally undertones are bubbling into his baritone voice and I can tell that she’s picking him apart down to the note. I’m enjoying her expressions as they flash through the seven stages of grief, his voice whittling down as the climax of their closing song rises from his chest and ricochets in the back of his throat. 

“Fuck, that’s rough,” she curses. Pinching the cigarette, her fingers shake in anticipation as she slides it from between her teeth and flicks it into a nearby ashtray. “Whatever. I’ll gladly clean up after that shitshow.” 

I take a lasting drag before mirroring Toni and crushing it in the saucer. “Shouldn’t be hard. Our audience is brain dead.” I say, huffing out remnants of smoke through my nostrils. 

Her shoulders roll in laughter. “I haven’t encountered a crowd you didn’t hate, Jug. You’re not exactly an impartial source.”

She isn’t wrong. But there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be among like minded individuals, especially when it comes to music. It’s an art form. If the people listening to it aren’t available to interpret what I offer up, what’s the fucking point of it all?

“Always superstitious, Topaz,” She freezes when I say this. “I’m not jinxing this one.”

Toni’s steel glare silences me. We get along normally half the time, the other half she’s ruminating on how to kill me discreetly. Whether through a formidable look or a physical altercation, I’m always reminded of my place. I think she’s reminded of her own as well: an asshole at the bottom of the food chain desperate to scavenge enough optimism and ambition to earn her place somewhere in the middle.

“Everyone tuned up?” I call out to redirect Toni’s attention. At my heels there should be Joaquin, our guitarist, and Sweet Pea, our bassist, who both will exchange woeful gazes with one another and murmur a few expletives before crawling on stage behind us. 

However, only one voice responds. “Well, I’m ready.” drawls Joaquin, which trips all my sensors. I feel my blood run cold in my veins. 

Toni and I turn to one another simultaneously and experience the rage as one. In my peripheral, I can see a middle-age man caked in sweat and exhaustion beckon us toward him, and suddenly I’m as alert and sober as I never hoped to be. 

“I’ll go,” I rush out. I don’t even mean it. I’d gladly resign that honor to Joaquin, who fucking deserves it, but I know that he isn’t as agile or determined. Really, though, I’m the worst person to set out in search of Sweet Pea. I’ll have to restrain myself from choking the dickhead out where he stands — or is collapsed, since he can’t go a day without shooting dope. 

The stench of liquor intensifies as I near another set of curtains and I quicken my pace, reaching forward to unveil the front room once I’ve reached the velvet boundary. 

I have to scour the crowd for his obnoxious presence, elbow through the drunken guests, and wade across seas of grey smoke until I’m able to make out an image of his slicked back hair and squared shoulders beneath a leather jacket. Something dark pools in my stomach and I’m now actively livid in reaching him.

“Fuckhead,” I spit venomously. It elicits no immediate response. My fingers clench, my nails burrowing into my palms.

Pea’s eyes flicker upward to meet mine. He’s toast. There’s nothing reflecting back at me. A wan smile graces his otherwise vacant expression, his head lilts onto the shoulder of a little blonde number he’s taken refuge with, and he’s fucking gone. 

I disregard what I’m seeing, however, determined to at least deliver him back into Toni’s custody half-alive. I skirt around the table separating us and promptly untangle the blonde’s arm from his waist. She makes a feeble attempt at protesting, but I silence her with a witty remark that I can’t hear myself say, what with the rush of blood to my head that comes with carrying a one-hundred-thirty pound man. I focus my energy instead on keeping Pea balanced in my grasp. 

“You’re a fucking disaster,” I hiss.

“Thanks.” he slurs.

The return journey is worse. I amble through intoxicating clouds of smoke that smell faintly of rich whisky and sex, every cell in my body seduced. I dig my forefingers into Pea’s ribs, tethering myself to this weight he adds onto me, this feeling of awareness I’d rather not have, but it brings me back into Toni’s vicinity, where she erupts, the volcanic rage directed at each one of us. 

The acid in her words fall as water droplets on my ears. I only see that man, frantically waving us on stage, perspiration decorating his pale skin and soaking his shirt. I wonder why he’s so eager for us to start our set, thinking that he could have skipped us, and something disgustingly hopeful in me wants to think he’s a God fearing man. That he knows what real faith is.

“We’re up,” I say. No one hears me. I realize I have to speak up if I want this band to survive another night. “We’re up.” I repeat.

Joaquin abates Toni, whose fuming tenor is a catalyst for the white-knuckled performance we’re about to inflict upon this poor, half-witted audience. Two of us march on stage with our instruments strapped to our person, however, she and I have to approach our instruments. It’s somehow more intimate that way. There’s something so indifferent about slinging a guitar over your shoulder. 

Zoning into the drums, settling into the chair, taking in its body and the power it withholds until I force it out. The bodice of the drums. The gleam of the cymbals. The sudden weight in my foot as I lower it onto the pedal. My thoughts, my ideas, my existence. It all ends here.

The next time I look up, we’re in the middle of our set. In the eight minutes since I’ve stepped onstage I’ve accomplished one thing: I have drowned myself enough in my own playing that I’ve been totally unaware of Pea’s abysmal bass. It might have been an act of self-preservation. I wouldn’t have lasted very long if I had to hear him butcher _Mindkiller_ , a painfully easy song to master on bass.

Our transition from _Only the Dead Can Judge the Living_ into our closing song, _Infinity Weeps_ , is the most palatable part of our performance. Blood whirs tirelessly in my ears and I relinquish my hands and arms to my drumsticks. My biceps must be pulsating. I have to be stronger than ever in this violent moment. I don’t know. I can only assume, because the last thing I’m able to remember is crashing the cymbals so hard I feel the sensation reverberate my skeleton, rearrange my DNA structure, teleport me into its sound. But I don’t stay there. I always come back.

~

When I do return from my electric high, I’m in the backseat of Toni’s Fiat Panda, spread out across Joaquin’s lap and listening to the lecture our lead singer is inflicting upon our imbecilic bassist. Blood has clotted in my ears and I consider myself lucky that I’m able to decipher half of what she’s saying. What I know for sure is that by the harsh and unrelenting tone in her voice, I agree with all of it.

Joaquin gazes down at me. I feel scrutinized, which I should be used to, but for some reason it’s alienating whenever he does it. I don’t stare back or make any suggestive movements like I typically would. I just knock my chin up and look out the window; the world tilted upside down from my view, all the stars falling from the sky into my lap.

“— you should be _castrated_. You don’t need a dick between your legs and one in your personality.” she hisses. I snort a bit too loudly and Pea shouts at me to shut the fuck up. From above, Joaquin cards a hand through my hair, like I’m in need of comfort, but I’ve been told much worse things. As Toni continues on her tirade and I watch the leisurely orbit of the moon, a song begins playing on the radio. Everyone groans.

I recognize it, how couldn’t I? American radio stations have been terrorized by it for the past six months; _Love Me Now_ has raped and pillaged my ear drums every time I switch to 95.1. It promises classic rock, then it plays that god awful single like clockwork. What’s worse is that we’re in the minority. You can’t attend any fucking parties without it broadcasting over the loudspeakers and everyone screeching along like it’s a hymn, or buy a round of shots at a bar after a brutal performance without a couple choosing it for karaoke.

“Toni, whine louder please, I can’t stand this shit.” groans Joaquin, but in protest Toni swats away Pea’s hand from the dash and keeps the station on. 

“I love this song!” she exclaims, the sarcasm palpable, and reaches between the door and the seat to crank her window down, subjecting the rest of Rochester to this indescribable torture. “We’re all spades in this game of hearts, baby!” sings Toni while hanging halfway out the vehicle, “So love me now and don’t be sorry!”

Sometimes, when I think the market is oversaturated with cookie-cutter love songs, I remind myself that it could always be worse. There could always be that one song that encapsulates the pure, unhinged capitalistic greed of the music industry, but instead, every record cycle we’re given a one hit wonder who fades into obscurity with the rest of his bland discography, and we’re meant to express gratitude.

The Leftovers, however? They’re exactly what I fear. A shill so persistent, so antagonizing, that we have no choice left but to endure.

And we share a hometown with them.

I lunge out of Joaquin’s lap and slam into the radio, some part of me shutting off the noise and causing Toni to veer off the road. She lets out an overdramatic shriek, saving us from a ditch in the nick of time, and I cackle while slinking back into my spot. While Joaquin, Pea, and I collapse into individual balls of laughter, Toni launches expletives at us and grips the wheel tighter than before. 

“You think Andrews’ throat ever gets sore, constantly sucking cock to keep that song on the charts?” inquires Sweet Pea with boisterous laughter.

“Once a bitch is broken in, she never gets worn out.” replies Joaquin poetically. “He’ll be sucking cock for many years to come, I’m sure of it.”

I give him a disgruntled look. “God, I hope you’re wrong.”

“When am I ever?”

“Uh, does anyone carry a calculator? I need to calculate the square root of how wrong Joaquin is perpetually.”

Toni’s contribution to the conversation is, “Wait. Don’t you know those assholes?” 

I don’t answer initially, hardly realizing that the question was directed at me. It takes her repeating the question twice for me to glance away from the window.

“I didn’t know them,” I insist. “I went to school with them. Entirely separate phenomena.”

I hear her click her tongue in irritation. “You know what I mean.”

“On the contrary. What are you implying, Topaz?”

When we hit a red light, she twists in her seat and glowers at me. “You know them.” Is all she says. I don’t seem to understand, meanwhile Joaquin and Pea fall silent in thought. I look around at my band members, dumbstruck, feeling like I’ve fallen into another dimension where somehow they’re smarter than me.

“Holy shit,” whispers Pea, sounding drunk and euphoric. 

“We couldn’t do that.” says Joaquin out of nowhere. My eyebrows stitch together and I look to him for guidance. He casts me a wary glance and I throw my hands in the air.

“Do what?!” I demand.

Toni scoffs at my lapse in intuition and turns to face the road once the light flashes green again. 

When it clicks, however, I feel every vein in my body clench and limit blood flow, all the heat rushing to my face. My hands clench harder than they did around my drumsticks and I let out a humorless laugh.

“No fucking way,” I say. “Since when are we the cocksuckers? Fuck ‘em, we’re making our own path to fame. Fuck’s sake. Are you all mental?”

“Yeah, cuz ‘making our own path’ has gone so smoothly for us. This is — what — our fifth battle of the bands this year alone? What are we, high schoolers?” says Toni. What a fucking defeatist. 

I lift myself up on my elbows. “I _barely_ know them. It’d be useless. The most it’d do is prove that we can’t hold our own, not snag us a record deal.” This isn’t entirely true. Of all the Leftovers, there was one member I knew somewhat intimately, but it’s been years since we’ve spoken. I doubt she could pick my face out of a crowd.

It’s not as if we dated or anything. We acquainted one another our sophomore year; I was shrimpy, non-threatening, and found comfort in the back of classrooms. She was a tragically misunderstood prep, a thrall to the more influential cheerleaders, melancholy and beautiful. We exchanged letters in our shared fifth period and didn’t speak otherwise, but I knew that her parents despised one another. I knew that her sister was in the early stages of pregnancy at the start of her senior year, but by the end of winter break she’d miraculously lost the twenty pounds she gained over Thanksgiving. I knew that Betty balled her hands into fists and forced her nails through her palms until crescent shapes hollowed out the soft flesh.

Likewise, Betty knew that I hated my father, that I missed my mother, and that I hadn’t seen my baby sister in six months. She knew that I picked up smoking over the summer and stole my father’s abandoned ‘75 cruiser every Friday night to seek solace at Sweetwater River. She knew that I wasn’t interested in her, that I preferred squared shoulders, sharpened edges, and roughened vocal chords. 

We both knew things we shouldn’t have. It bonded us, for a while, until it didn’t. So it goes, I thought, not as wounded by the dissonance as I thought I’d be.

“How do you know? Maybe they’ll like our stuff. They’re cogs in the machine, but what if they have this deep, hidden desire to be more than that?” entertains Toni. “It could be a mutual agreement, if you think about it.”

“Devil’s Advocate doesn’t suit you,” I say through gritted teeth. 

“I fucking hate them as much as you do, Jug, but what the hell do we have to lose?” she sounds pleading, which doesn’t suit her either.

From above me, Joaquin appears inquisitive. “Fuck. What if she’s got a point?”

“She doesn’t.” I say, then reiterate, “It’s a stupid idea. Masochistic, even.”

“We could go without you,” says Toni acidically. “It’s not like anyone cares about the drummer’s opinions anyway. Do you understand how replaceable you are, Jughead?”

“Fuck you,” I spit. “How are you going to convince them to let you piggyback off their success without me? I’m the only one of us they ‘know’.”

Toni sits quietly, using her dozen or so unfried brain cells to conjure a response. “We’ll figure out something.”

I open my mouth to unleash a spiel laced with vitriol before Joaquin reaches out and goes to calm me in this patronizing way he does that hardly helps, but I catch his wrist and hold his hand in midair. I don’t mean anything suggestive by it, I don’t even feel a spark of electricity when our skin connects, yet he stares at me with the sky in his eyes, as if I’d sewn the very fabric of the universe together. I release him and he seems to understand that the gravity he feels is his own.

We don’t speak for the rest of the drive.

When we do cross the city limit, a wood sign greets us at the Rockland county line. Its sun-bleached paint spell out ‘Riverdale’; the text is aslant and overlays a backdrop depicting a heavenly landscape of mountains and a river that encompasses a quarter of the frame, the whole image illuminated by a single spotlight. When I peer over the front seat, all I can see is a polluted stream and dead trees. No mountains in sight. Must have eroded while we were gone.

Our respective homes are in the Southside, so we have to cut through the Northside where there resides all the colonial style houses, white picket fences, fully lit streets, and teenagers breaking curfew on their bicycles. Toni veers onto Stardust Boulevard, where my old high school still remains in its mediocre glory, their best students long gone, having taken on the world stage and forgotten this town and all its teachings. We pass the corrupt police station, where my dad had a stint once in his ever-changing faith, and we pass the park where my mom used to leave Jellybean and I on weekends when she was due for a bender. In the crescent moonlight, the silver of a slide I would send Jellybean down reflects miraculously, the memories duller than the shine.

Then we swerve on Maple Street.

A two-story house sits fourth on the left side of the street. Gifts are strewn across the lawn and candles flicker in the breeze, appearing more like a memorial than a celebration. An overgrown poplar tree threatens to shadow the powerline and I wonder if anyone will trim it — this house is a relic of epic proportions, having once belonged to the herald of modern folk, Fred Andrews, so maybe they think that grooming the property will cleanse it of its mystique, something that I feel a lot of like-minded individuals I normally agree with would say has deteriorated since The Leftovers’ rise to stardom.

You often hear about separating the son from his father’s sins, but I think the opposite should apply to this situation. Fred Andrews clearly did not inspire a drop of integrity or wisdom in Archie, which absolves him from having to answer for the blight on music his son caused as a result. 

I would never admit this, but I’m partial to folk. It’s what the feed from my portable radio as a kid always picked up, the nearest radio tower once having decent taste, and aside from the minor elements of indoctrination, I genuinely enjoyed it. There hadn’t been a musically inclined person in my family until I heard _Rocks On the River East_ under a hissing static for the first time.  
Yeah, I’m still trying to figure out if that was a good thing or not, too.

The house is a landmark now. Not as well kept as monuments in D.C. or even the pathways of a national park, but it’s a place where everyone in town can convene and think themselves capable of something greater than all this, and in very quiet moments I share the same thoughts as they do.

The transition from the Northside to the Southside is crudely marked by the unmaintained railroad. Toni skids over the tracks and everyone jostles in their seats. I let out an audible sigh. 

Home sweet home.

~

As I watch Toni’s car peel out of my makeshift driveway, I feel small, electric pulses of adrenaline begin fading as the night closes. A sigh escapes my lips and I reach for the doorknob — I twist and it opens, so I know my dad isn’t inside.

The trailer is dark and smells like booze, a muggy film trapping in the heavy scent around me. I’d be tempted to grab a beer from the fridge, but if the door is open and dad is gone then that means there’s no more alcohol in the house, so I make do with a can of coke and trudge to my room.

My window is half-opened, the calming spring breeze ventilating my room. I crack open the can and shotgun half of it before abandoning it on my dresser. There’s nothing worse than coming down after a show. It’s draining, leaving you wanting nothing more than your bed and a cigarette, which I have, but the satisfaction of rest pales in comparison to the performance.

I nurse a Marlboro and stare out my window, the junkyard that is my home looking back at me. I used to fantasize about setting it all aflame, witnessing the burning of a world I hated, but I can’t even find contempt in me anymore. Sometimes I fantasize instead about the way things were once, before people planted their trailers here, before they spotted this patch of unspecial dirt, before they decided to build Riverdale from the ground up. How different that world was. 

More trees, if that’s possible. Less smog in the sky. Cabins populating the forest instead of tin shacks. Smoke billowing from a chimney, fire crackling indoors, Pa with his latest kill spit-roasting while the kids run around barefoot with nothing but chickens to keep them entertained, Ma yearning for her youth, a boy looking across a pond at a girl. Old times. A Bob Dylan song. 

I wonder what kind of world Archie Andrews imagines existed before him. I wonder more if he thinks it matters. He’s got limelights in his eyes and a stereo in his heart, I’d be surprised if he could picture the world that exists outside his peripheral.

But maybe, I entertain, maybe we see the same one. If he’s anything like his father, there’s a chance of this — nothing astronomical, in fact nowhere near that mount, yet it persists in my consciousness — and that alone piques my curiosity in crossing paths once more.

The last of the vibrations fade from my system, I feel nothing at all except my lungs beating as I inhale, and all I can see behind my eyelids when I close them are the brown eyes of someone I only ever knew in passing. 

What a strange, strange night. 

I fall asleep feeling more drunk than I’ve ever been without a drop of alcohol entering my bloodstream.

**Author's Note:**

> Months and months and months in the making.... I stalled for a VERY long time on this one. When that band episode aired, I was like what the fuck, they took my idea and butchered it! Fuck the CW. I'm fixing it all.
> 
> TWs for future reference: this story contains mentions and/or depictions of drug abuse, familial trauma, homophobia, and sexual assault, all involving the main characters.


End file.
